P4000: VHD sizing / Management

[KFKGmbH]

Hello to all.

I am relatively new to P4000 and while installing a test environment, there are coming up several questions. I hope someone can give me a few hints for successfully installing this solution in production environments.

My first question is: If I have a local storag of 1200GB, what size should the virtual hard disk for the VSA be configured? Is there a percentage that should stay free on the VMFS? And the same question comes up when sizing the volume(s) inside the VSA? And in which cases configure more than one volume?

The second is management of the VSA virtual machines and the failover manager. Can two virtual NICs be configured? One has to be placed into the iSCSI network, and we want the iSCSI network physically isolated from the production network. Is it possible to configure a second NIC for the VSAs and the FOM and how to configure this second NIC to only be used for management traffic and not for iSCSI traffic?

Thank you very much for your time.

Best regards

Thorsten

[ajamil786]

You can use the maximum size available to the ESX virtualization host on the local disk. The usable space when you define the volumes in the CMC will be roughly 5% less due to Meta data overhead.
You can add a second NIC just like any other virtual machine but all your nodes including the FOM and VIP has to be on the same network(subnet). I don't see an advantage of adding another NIC since VSA does not support NIC bonding. You can use the maximum size available to the ESX virtualization host on the local disk. The usable space when you define the volumes in the CMC will be roughly 5% less due to Meta data overhead.
You can add a second NIC just like any other virtual machine but all your nodes including the FOM and VIP has to be on the same network(subnet). I don't see an advantage of adding another NIC since VSA does not support NIC bonding.

[KFKGmbH]

Hello and thank you for your answer.

-So I dont have to let space free for snapshots or other things? I can always choose the maximum available space?

-The second NIC for the VSA and the FOM should be for management only. I would like to have one NIC in the iSCSI network for iSCSI Traffic only and the second NIC in a separate management network WITHOUT ANY iSCSI-Traffic, but for management only.

Best regards

Thorsten

[Uwe Zessin]

The VSA and its data storage must be set to independent disks anyway. I leave a few gigabytes free in the VMFS.

A hint: if you fill the datastore, you will see an alarm in vCenter. I've created a special folder for these datastores and applied an extra alarm that triggers when the used space is *less* than 50% or so. That way you will still see a 'Normal' status, but get an alarm when one deletes the vmdk files ;-)

[KFKGmbH]

Thank you for your help!

Best regards

Thorsten

[KFKGmbH]

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